Can anyone who has used the Z-pack tell me how it does in terms of velocity layers? The kit-piece demos on fxpansion for the Z-pack sound great; I love how crisp and clean those hats sound--but I noticed that they tend to be a little smaller memory-wise (relative to say Platinum Samples stuff).

Are you able to do some convincing hat finesse work with the Z-pack material, and program patterns with a wide dynamic range (ghost close tip notes all the way up to full power open hits)?

Also, any issues with integrating the kit pieces in the Z-pack with BFD2 (not Eco)?

Thanks!

-Thomas

Tue Oct 04, 2011 10:34 pm

mandren

Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 20

Re: Z-pack velocity layers?

tsteak86 wrote:

Can anyone who has used the Z-pack tell me how it does in terms of velocity layers? The kit-piece demos on fxpansion for the Z-pack sound great; I love how crisp and clean those hats sound--but I noticed that they tend to be a little smaller memory-wise (relative to say Platinum Samples stuff).

Are you able to do some convincing hat finesse work with the Z-pack material, and program patterns with a wide dynamic range (ghost close tip notes all the way up to full power open hits)?

Also, any issues with integrating the kit pieces in the Z-pack with BFD2 (not Eco)?

Thanks!

-Thomas

The Platinum Samples expansions dwarfs pretty much anything in terms of velocity layers.
I'm also interested in knowing how many velocity layers most kit pieces average per articulation.

The kit-piece demos on fxpansion for the Z-pack sounds much better than the provided video link on the product page.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ZildjianGen16
I don't know what they did to the samples or what preset they used, because in that video it sounds very bad. At least to me.

EDIT: I might have misunderstood the video. It probably just shows the Gen16 Zildjian AE cymbals and their sound. The sampled cymbal sounds from the Z-pack are not triggered in that video. Can someone confirm?

Thu Oct 06, 2011 9:53 am

tsteak86

Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 13

Thanks for the response, Mandren!

Yeah Platinum Samples does seem to dwarf every other expansion pack in terms of the depth with which they sample kit pieces. I hope that credo of "hypersampling" gets adopted by future expansion packs (not that any BFD expansion packs have sounded bad or lackluster to my knowledge!).

I think the Youtube video cymbal sounds on Gen16's Youtube profile are just from those new electro-acoustic cymbals---I think. I don't believe those cymbals have the ability to trigger MIDI notes.

Any other Z-pack users here on the forum that could vouch for the expansion pack as worthwhile? Are there enough velocity layers, or is it prone to sounding "machine-gunny" and artificial?

Thanks!

Sat Oct 08, 2011 8:48 pm

john emrichRighteous Drum Lord

Joined: 04 Oct 2004
Posts: 790

The cymbals play great in both platforms. Being that Zildjian ships with it's own version of Eco, all of the attention was directed at the velocity curve of the samples produced instead of piling on a huge sample count. These are very long samples! The key for this library is all about the response and expressiveness.

The master cymbal testers from Zildjian blessed the samples. in fact, there was a blind audition for this gig and they were able to pick out each cymbal by name and weight just by listening to it. They could not see the name of each cymbal.

Sorry for the biased input here, but they are very nice samples.....

John

Sun Oct 09, 2011 12:40 am

jord

Joined: 11 Sep 2006
Posts: 3275
Location: Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Quote:

The Platinum Samples expansions dwarfs pretty much anything in terms of velocity layers.

Drums, perhaps. As far as cymbals go, many of the pieces don't have any more than 30 levels, which is comparable to the number of velocity levels in the Z-Packs (I have the first pack and I enjoy it very much).

If anything, I wouldn't worry about the quality of any pack that is produced by John. All of them are very expressive and musical. And this is coming from an unbiased paying customer.

jord

_________________Real guitar heroes play real guitars

Sun Oct 09, 2011 6:45 am

mandren

Joined: 29 Jul 2009
Posts: 20

jord wrote:

Quote:

The Platinum Samples expansions dwarfs pretty much anything in terms of velocity layers.

Drums, perhaps. As far as cymbals go, many of the pieces don't have any more than 30 levels, which is comparable to the number of velocity levels in the Z-Packs (I have the first pack and I enjoy it very much).

If anything, I wouldn't worry about the quality of any pack that is produced by John. All of them are very expressive and musical. And this is coming from an unbiased paying customer.

jord

Maybe you're right about the cymbals having less velocity layers than the drums. I don't own any Platinum Samples expansions for BFD2...yet. I have Evil Drums for Superior Drummer.
Overall I think the Platinum Samples expansions (rock, classic, evil) have more velocity layers though. The Jim Scott expansion for example has kit pieces with as much as 256 velocity levels according to the website.

I don't worry about the quality of the samples, but generally there's a perceivable difference in performance, responsiveness and dynamics on e-drums between a sample set with ~30 velocity layers compared to a sample set with 128+ velocity layers....especially if the same team did both of them.
If you're not triggering the samples on e-drums and instead program them in an editor the difference will be much less apparent.

If these samples were aimed/optimized for ECO, my guess would be that they have ~24 velocity layers.

I tend to be less sensible to low velocity cymbals than low velocity snares or toms though, so maybe this pack of samples would perform sufficiently for me anyway.

Sun Oct 09, 2011 6:52 pm

tsteak86

Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 13

Thanks for all the input, guys. Yeah ~30 velocity layers for cymbals is still pretty decent.

Then there's the Bosphorus Stanton Moore expansion to consider too. I don't know about velocity layers or articulations for that expansion. It's for sale at half price now.

It would be nice to see the actual velocity level count and available articulations for every kit-piece on all the expansions for BFD2. Now it's possible to listen to them and see how big they are in data, but not how many velocity levels they have. There's different velocity levels for all articulations, but it would be nice to at least see how many levels the main "Hit"-articulation has. I know, velocity levels are not all that matters, but neither are size or articulations.

Maybe I should make a separate thread about this, just to see if there's anyone more than me that cares about it? Maybe a poll if it's possible.

Mon Oct 10, 2011 8:48 am

tsteak86

Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 13

Dude, definitely poll it. I'm behind fxpansion being up front about velocity layers 100%. It would potentially be a big deciding factor for me.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying fxpansion people are currently being disingenuous or 'not up front' about the kit pieces in their packs. Certainly not accusing them of that! They do indeed give us kit browser audio samples of four different velocity layers and the overall MB or GB size of each kit piece, which is helpful.

But I agree with Mandren that it would be awesome for us customers to know how many velocity layers are in each kit piece. It seems to be a more widely adopted practice now with sample purveyors such as 8dio, Soundiron, Orange Tree Samples, Soniccouture, Heavyocity, and East West advertising how many velocity layers and RR are there in the instrument for each articulation.

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